Re: Holocaust.films
- From: "Rhino" <rhino_redux@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:39:00 -0400
"Rich Rostrom" <rrostrom.21stcentury@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:rrostrom.21stcentury-2634B1.16294521082006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Rhino" <rhino_redux@xxxxxxxx> wrote:Do we really know that information on China under Mao is less accessible
The fact that the Chinese language is somehow massively different
from European languages seems irrelevant to me.
Why is it irrelevant that information on one
topic is easily accessible and information on
another topic is difficult of accesss, when
considering why one topic gets a lot more
attention than the other?
than information on the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin? Or is
information on China just accessed less frequently because there is less
interest outside of China?
I've read quite a few books about the history of the Soviet Union and I've
always been curious to know more about China's experience with Mao but I
have only limited time to read and haven't indulged that curiousity as
aggresively as I would have liked if I had more time. For all I know, there
are many more books on China under Mao than about the Soviet Union.
Sorry, I'm still not clear why you're making such a big deal of the languageRussian uses a different script than the Latin
script used in Western Europe yet English translations of
Solzhenitsyn clearly conveyed the horror of Lenin's and Stalin's
heinous dictatorship.
You seem to confuse the possibility
of something being achievable once
by strenuous effort and great ability
with something being done easily and
routinely.
issue. It doesn't seem to me to be conceptually harder to translate Chinese
to English than it is to translate Russian to English. Both Chinese and
Russian use different scripts than English, both languages are strikingly
different than English. There are professional translators that can
translate Chinese to English just as there are professional translators that
can translate Russian to English. Perhaps there are larger numbers of
Russian to English translators than Chinese to English translators; I
wouldn't know about that. But since there are many more Chinese speakers
than Russian speakers and many Chinese living outside of China, often in
English speaking countries, I rather suspect there are _more_ people who are
bilingual in Chinese and English than in Russian and English. If there are
more people who are bilingual in Chinese and English, I'm inclined to
suspect there are more Chinese/English speakers who are fluent enough to be
a professional translator than for the case of Russian to English.
Even today, only a few people have moreAgreed.
than a vague idea of the horrors of
Soviet Communism.
Part of this has to do with the fact
that writing in Russian is not easily
accessible to anyone but Russians;
I agree with that but only partially.
Certainly, there are many books about the history of the Soviet Union that
were written in Russian and which have not been translated; those are
inevitably accessible only to Russian speakers. Those Russian speakers are
predominantly found in the former Soviet Union and its former satellites but
also include Russian emigres and their descendents living outside that area,
as well as academics like Robert Conquest.
On the other hand, until glasnost, a great many Soviet citizens knew less
about their own history than history enthusiasts like you and me. I once had
a conversation with a Russian Jew from Kazakhstan who asked me if I'd read
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and what year I'd read it. I told him I'd
first read it in 1982. He remarked that I knew his country's history earlier
than he did because he hadn't been able to read Solzhenitsyn until he'd been
able to leave the Soviet Union some years after 1982. Even though he'd lived
his entire life in the Soviet Union, I'd known about the Gulag before he
had! Actually, I'm sure he knew that the Gulag had _existed_ since very few
families were untouched by collectivization or the purges so I really should
say I knew the DETAILS of how the Gulag worked before he did. I continue to
find this highly ironic as I've never set foot in the former Soviet Union; a
few hours in East Germany in 1983 was the closest I've ever come.
and
a further part was due to a view of Russia
as a remote and backwards country. For
instance, this comment was made by the
poet W H Auden, a notorious fellow-traveller
in the 1930s, but repentant later:
Our great error was not a false admiration for
Russia but a snobbish feeling that nothing which
happened in a semi-barbarous country which had
experienced neither the Renaissance nor the
Enlightenment could be of any importance: had
any of the countries we knew personally, like
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
France, Germany or Italy, the language of which
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
we could speak and where we had personal
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
friends, been one to have a successful communist
^^^^^^^
revolution with the same phenomena of terror,
purges, censorship etc, we would have screamed
our heads off.
There's no doubt that the language barrier greatly facilitated the selling
of Communism to Western intellectuals; few of the intellectuals spoke
Russian and simply believed whatever their "tour guides" in the Soviet Union
told them. These minders made sure that Westerners were kept away from the
places and people that would give the Soviet Union a bad name and instead
shown Potemkin villages/factories/prisons. This made them easy prey for the
party line.
But some truth always got out. For instance, I've spent some time at the
Gareth Jones website and found some fascinating stories there. Jones was a
fluent Russian speaker who managed to strike out on his own and talk to
people directly, in their own language, without the presence of minders from
the Soviet authorities. He toured the Soviet Union during collectivization
and spoke directly to those who were enduring this horror. He reported that
the two men most hated by the peasants were Stalin (no surprise there) and
George Bernard Shaw! They despised Shaw because the Soviet press was full of
Shaw's fulsome praise for the great miracles being wrought in the Soviet
Union, which they knew to be a horrible lie. This website can be found here:
http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.html.
Another interesting source for information is Emma Goldman, a lifelong
radical who had herself been born and raised in the Russian Empire before
emigrating to the US. When the US government tried to deport her to Russia
in 1919 as a result of the Palmer Raids, she declined to resist deportation
on the theory that she was finally going to be able to see the Promised Land
of Russia. She spent over a year there and even met with top Politburo
figures, including Lenin. She left a very bitter and disillusioned woman
after seeing how the reality of the Revolution contrasted so greatly with
the ideals she had championed. Her book, My Disillusionment in Russia, can
be found here:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/index.htm.
Sadly, the people who told the truth about the Revolution in Russia were
often not as influential on mass public opinion in the West as they should
have been; pro-Bolshevik enthusiasts were often more attractive because of
the Utopian vision they were peddling.
Again, I haven't looked very closely at the literature about China but I
can't help but suspect that there are indeed books and writers that have
related the true experience of Mao's China, although I haven't actually
searched actively for them. Certainly Jung Chang's book, which I mentioned
in my previous post sounds as if it covers that ground and I can't help but
believe that many others have been written over the years.
I've always been disappointed to see that the horrors which took place in
the Soviet Union and China have received such scanty treatment in film. We
know that many more people died in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China
than in the Holocaust yet I am at a loss to name more than two
(non-documentary) films that covered the Gulag experience in the Soviet
Union - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1970)
[http://imdb.com/title/tt0067530/combined] and Gulag (1985)
[http://imdb.com/title/tt0089240/] - and I can't think of ANY about The
Great Leap Forward in China.
There is no question that the Holocaust is a vitally important historical
event that should know be known by every civilized human being, However, I'd
like to see similar attention paid to the "other holocausts", like the ones
in the Soviet Union and China.
I continue to be concerned that some people are getting the message that
holocausts only happen at the hands of right-wing parties like the Nazis
which is clearly NOT the case. Parties of ANY political persusasion can
engineer mass murder and everyone needs to remain vigilant against
governments and political movements that would conduct such atrocities
against them, given the power.
--
Rhino
.
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